A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu

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The following books by Robert Paul Wolff are available on Amazon.com as e-books: KANT'S THEORY OF MENTAL ACTIVITY, THE AUTONOMY OF REASON, UNDERSTANDING MARX, UNDERSTANDING RAWLS, THE POVERTY OF LIBERALISM, A LIFE IN THE ACADEMY, MONEYBAGS MUST BE SO LUCKY, AN INTRODUCTION TO THE USE OF FORMAL METHODS IN POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY.Now Available: Volumes I, II, III, and IV of the Collected Published and Unpublished Papers.

NOW AVAILABLE ON YOUTUBE: LECTURES ON KANT'S CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON. To view the lectures, go to YouTube and search for "Robert Paul Wolff Kant." There they will be.

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Friday, March 1, 2013

WHAT HAVE I BEEN DOING -- PART NINETEEN

Competition standardizes commodities, substitutes abstract calculation for
concrete technical judgment, stifles passions that are inappropriately aroused
by the natural properties of goods, and breeds up by ruthless selection a new
capitalist man for whom only exchange value is real.This same historical process of development
produces a mass of workers who, in the homogeneity of their culture, their
mobility, and their lack of particularized skills, approximate ever closer to
the inverted ideal of abstract labor.As
the rational becomes real, the real becomes ever more irrational.These absurd forms of thought -- the
commodity as quantum of crystallized value, the worker as petty commodity
producer of abstract labor -- acquire social validity and hence objectivity,
which is to say that successful day-to-day interaction with the world of work
and consumption, of production and circulation, requires workers an capitalists
to apprehend their environment, interpret their experience, and guide their
actions by means of them.But if socially valid, which is to say effective in operation and confirmed
in experience, then how absurd?We have
already examined Marx's mocking logical analysis of the concept of a commodity
as a quantum of value, in order to demonstrate the inner logical inversions on
which such a notion rests.Now we must
present an historical and social account of the actual human and social damage
that results from the instantiation, or social validation, of the concept.The story is twofold, on the side of the worker and on the side of the
capitalist.Subjectively, the worker as
purveyor of abstract, averagely efficient labor is torn between her natural
human needs and the needs of capital.Her mind and body require a graceful, rational, integrated development
if she is to achieve a healthy fulfillment of her nature.[We see here the connection between the
teachings of Marx's earliest writings, especially the Economic-Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, and his mature
writings.]But the exigencies of
profitability demand the services of a neutral, adaptable labor power
unencumbered by such obstructive predispositions as natural body rhythms, craft
traditions, or a preference for participation in the planning, direction, and
evaluation of the activity of production.The concept of abstract labor is socially
valid because the more fully the worker construes his actual work situation
in its terms, the more successful he is, as measured by the criteria implicit
in the concept itself -- criteria endlessly reconfirmed by employers, fellow-workers,
ministers, teachers, and even by the members of his own family.The more completely he remakes himself in the
image of abstract labor, the more likely he is to get and hold a job, win the
praise of those around him, ad weather the periodic economic storms.This repeated social confirmation confers
objective validity on the concept, so that finally it comes to seem that
resistance to the regime of the machine is mulish stubbornness, rejection of
the authority of the bosses is sinful rebelliousness, and dissatisfaction with
a subsistence wage is self-indulgence.The absurdity, the crackbrainedness of the concept of the commodity,
Marx holds, is, on the subjective side, made manifest in the increasing misery
of the increasingly productive, increasingly twisted and thwarted, ever more
alienated workers.On the objective side, on the side of capital, the immediate and irrefutable
evidences of the absurdity of the categories of bourgeois political economy are
the periodic crises that threaten to bring to a disastrous halt the processes
of reproduction and accumulation.Economic crises, Marx argues, are the direct consequence of the attempt
by capitalists to conform their economic decisions to the tenets of rationality
enshrined as socially valid, and hence objective, categories of bourgeois
political economy.It is the social
relations of production and circulation, not the technology of capitalism, that
produce crises.The self-destructiveness
of capitalism results from the capitalists' reduction of all economic decisions
to profitability, to the quantitative measurement of self-expanding value.The concepts of value, money, and capital
achieve social validity through their short-term success.Capitalists unable or unwilling to live by
the ascetic rule of profit-maximization are driven to the wall in the
competition of the market.The craziness
of these concepts is manifested in the crises that periodically destroy even
the most economically rational of entrepreneurs.We can see now that there is indeed an inner theoretical connection between
Marx's economic doctrines of exploitation and crisis, his psychological theory
of alienation, and his metaphysical thesis of the objective irrationality of
capitalist social formations.Marx's
philosophical, as opposed to his economic, doctrines have often been construed
in ways that make them relatively impervious to disconfirmation.It is important therefore to observe that if
my reading of Marx is correct, the soundness of his philosophical conception of
the objective irrationality of capitalism depends essentially both on his claim
that capitalism produces a progressive alienation of the working class and on
his thesis that capitalism is fatally prone to ever more serious economic
crises.If the evidence leads us to give
up these hypotheses, then we lose the critical perspective from which we can
issue a negative evaluation of capitalism.But that, of course, is the price of nonvacuous theory.All right.Let us take a deep breath
after these sixteen "parts" of my narrative and recall where we began,
what now seems like ages ago.I posed a
deceptively simple question:Why does
Marx write like that?My answer was that
Marx's conception of the economic, historical, social, and psychological
character of capitalist society requires him to adopt a complex, highly charged
ironic voice, not only in his informal descriptions of the world he observed
but also in his formal economic analysis of the social relations of production
of capitalist economic formations.The
time has come to pull together my many arguments, observations, and formal
analyses in something like a single integrated summation.I began, you will recall, by arguing that the language in which a social
theory finds expression must be adequate, in its linguistic resources, to the ontological
structure of the object of its discourse.The classical political economists, like their contemporary
neo-classical successors, believed that capitalism as such is a rational form
of economic organization.It is only the
people living in a capitalist society who sometimes fall short of that
objective rationality, by failing to guide their investments, purchases, sales,
and public tax policies by prudentially rational calculation.This subjective irrationality of economic
agents can lead to economic distortions and thence even to economic crises.As a consequence of this belief, Ricardo and his school used a transparent
prose designed to reveal the objective rational economic structure lying
beneath the sometimes confusing surface appearances of market prices, temporary
super-profits, and local customs.We as
readers are encouraged thereby to adjust our subjective performances to the
objective rationality of capitalism.But Marx, as we now see, holds that capitalism is objectively
irrational.The central irrationalities
may be summarized under four headings:First the human capacity for productive laboring is treated as a commodity
to be bought in the market for a price.Indeed, as Marx and Engels show us in their vivid factual accounts of
the condition of wage-laborers under early capitalism, mothers and fathers
actually produced this capacity for laboring, as embodied in their children, in
order that that it might be sold on the market at the reduced prices assigned
to child labor;Second, in a capitalist economy, production is carried out for the purpose
of making a profit, not for the purpose of satisfying human needs, with the
consequence that desires must be artificially created for profitable
commodities while basic human needs go unsatisfied;Third, under capitalism economic relationships appear to us in mystified
form as a network of mutually beneficial exchanges of equals for equals,
whereas in fact capitalism is a structure of exploitation of workers by
capitalists;And finally, political economy represents produced goods and services,
through the mediation of market exchange and the system of money, in crackpot
metaphysical fashion as quanta of abstract value clothed in sensory garb.To talk about this world, Marx finds, the transparent one-dimensional
language of the classical school of political economy is thoroughly inadequate,
indeed, directly misleading.

6 comments:

are you familiar with this book? would you recommend it as a good introduction to the subject? http://www.amazon.com/Marx-A-Very-Short-Introduction/dp/0192854054/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1362160936&sr=8-1&keywords=marx+very+small+introduction

About Me

As I observed in one of my books, in politics I am an anarchist, in religion I am an atheist, and in economics I am a Marxist. I am also, rather more importantly, a husband, a father, a grandfather, and a violist.